


fleeting

by lionsenpai



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Post Widow Retrieval
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 07:17:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9808880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionsenpai/pseuds/lionsenpai
Summary: Angela is a doctor after all, a healer. She grasps the wisps of life between her fingers as they try to slip from a body, forcing them back within, forcing them to flare again.





	

They don't speak. 

With appointments twice a day, they were always bound to grow thick as thieves or distant as celestial bodies, constantly circling one another but never drawing nearer. Angela thinks that perhaps, were they closer before, she might know what to say to draw Amélie into her orbit, begin to coax life from those concrete eyes. 

She is a doctor after all, a healer. She grasps the wisps of life between her fingers as they try to slip from a body, forcing them back within, forcing them to flare again. 

If there are wisps of life within Amélie, Angela cannot find them. 

Ana tells her that she's the wrong kind of doctor to be looking, but that doesn't seem to matter when Angela sees her so often anyway. 

Keeping an eye out for a hint of reaction, Angela turns Amélie's hands over, only the faintest urging required. Checking her pulse is always a struggle with the heavy manacles, but Amélie pulls the steel higher on her thin arm until it nearly constricts her already poor circulation. Anymore might cause the splotches of violet blooming on her brown skin like a shroud of flowers to spread, the natural color disappearing once more.

Angela sets two fingers to her wrist, counting. Amélie watches without seeing. 

"Your pulse is stronger today," Angela tries, speaking for the first time since telling Amélie's guards to wait at the door as always. They stand there now, guns held at the ready, and Angela does her best to ignore them. "I think we may be on the right track."

No one wants a doctor who can't see the glimmer of hope in bleak times, but even Angela feels her optimism is inappropriate and out of place when Amélie glances up at her face. When the right track can't rouse kindness or cruelty from her, Angela has to wonder _this_ is right. 

Amélie was a lively soul, quiet only if you judged her by her words. In everything she did, she was exuberant, her whole heart put into it. Angela knew her only through gossip heard at Ana's side or the occasional hallway meeting in one of Overwatch's various bases. Her smile didn't light up the room, but there was no reserve in it, the corners of her eyes wrinkling with delight.

No matter how hard she looks, Angela cannot see an ounce of Amélie in this body before her. 

She almost thinks Widowmaker was better. A distorted mirror of Amélie, her cold heart put into everything she did, but a mirror which showed traces of the woman that once was. Widowmaker did monstrous things, but she lived and breathed in more than just the literal sense.

Amélie breathes now, but it's hard to assign life to her beyond her vitals. Her blood pumping faithfully. Her heart beating, growing stronger by the day. 

"I have a needle," Angela warns, turning her back on Amelie to prepare the injection. "It will pinch a bit. The same as always."

The guards shift uncomfortably. They always do. Needles are dangerous weapons, even if Amélie scarcely moves without prompting anymore. Angela has tried to dismiss their concerns, but there is always someone to remind her: one shot to reach for a weapon or strangle Angela with her cuffs is all she needs. One shot will kill her, if Widowmaker's track record is anything to go by.

To ease the tension, Angela reaches toward the radio on her desk, flicking it on and turning the dial absently while she double checks the dosage. Too much could send Amélie's recovering heart into tachycardia and then cardiac arrest. Too little might lower her pulse enough to deprive her brain of precious oxygen.

The first station with music is fine with Angela, and she turns toward her patient, the notes of some classical orchestra lilting softly in the background. 

"Sit down!"

Angela nearly drops the syringe with the rush of motion behind her, guards surging forward with their weapons drawn and trained on Amélie—on Amélie, who—

Who is _standing._

She looks a bit like sudden realization, looks a bit like hopeless disorientation, but when she looks at Angela with parted lips and the hint of a furrowing brow, all Angela sees is _life._

"Wait, wait—" Angela nearly throws the needle to be rid of it, flinging herself in the space between the soldiers and Amélie. "Wait!"

There's a beat of protest, but Angela isn't even looking their way, her eyes glued to the subtly shifting expression on Amélie's face. Like a flickering flame, it nearly extinguishes, blown this way and that by unseen forces. It's barely there at all, but Angela sees it now, and she does what she always does when she sees it.

She grasps it tight.

"Amélie?" Angela catches herself before she all but seizes Amélie's hands, forcing her own to wring in front of her instead of grab. Minute pupil dilation. A twitch of movement down her arms which isn't entirely deliberate. "Can you hear me?"

The music plays, and Amélie switches her stance, one foot sliding just behind the other, her toes pointed out. Angela stares in confusion before her arms rise, sweeping up and curving. The manacles keep them close together, but Angela recognizes the intent: the beginning of a dance.

Her gaze staggers to the radio on her desk, the piece it's playing rising in a gentle crescendo. Does Amélie know this song? Does she remember it?

When Angela looks back at Amélie, her expression has changed. It's wavering more than before, gaping without making a sound, her golden eyes flickering around the room. Her position goes stiff, her muscles all straining, and Angela is startled from her her horror by a pair of guards muscling by her.

She elbows the first hard enough to knock the air out of him, but the second manages to get her hands on Amélie, tugging her arms down as the last vestiges of panic fade into nothing again.

"Dr. Ziegler—" the guard begins, but Angela silences her with a hard shove.

"Off of her!" she all but shouts. Life slips through her fingers like water, and now she's lost it again. "Out of my office, immediately! Both of you! I don't want to see you again!"

Ugly hatred rises in her, both for the guards and for herself, for letting the moment slip away. She is a doctor, and she grasps life and holds tight, never allowing it to escape.

Until now.

Amélie is unaffected as always, and the music reaches its crescendo without triggering anything more in her. Angela watches in the vain hope that the sound will provoke something more, yet the only thing the song's slow descent gives her is disappointment.

The guards stay some ways off, but neither will leave.

"Dr. Ziegler. Please... The injection."

Angela barely resists cursing them both, but the damnably rational part of her mind tells her that even if the didn't intervene, the weak flame of life in Amélie couldn't last. Not yet. Not even with Angela there.

It makes her feel all the more useless.

Staring long and hard at Amélie, Angela finally relents, her shoulders sagging. Gently, she sets her hands to Amélie's shoulders, urging her to sit. She does without protest, blinking sedately.

"The two of you. Not another word." The glare she shoots over her shoulder seems to have more effect than her thrown elbow or hard shove. The guards shrink somewhat. "I meant what I said. Someone else will escort her from now on."

The syringe is on the desk, perfectly intact. She retrieves it and returns to Amélie's side, murmuring, "Small pinch, Amélie. One, two, three—"

Amélie doesn't react to the injection. She doesn't react at all, and Angela has to force herself to withdraw the needle from her bicep and turn away. Whatever the song stirred in Amélie is in deep hibernation once more, and Angela remembers Ana's words: _you're the wrong kind of doctor to help her._

"I'll see you tomorrow after breakfast, Amélie," Angela says, tossing the syringe into the bio-waste bin. "Perhaps we'll listen to the radio more? Perhaps you'll even convince me to dance."

There is no response, and Angela's heart clenches enough to turn her attempt at a smile into a grimace. There's nothing else she can do but bid Amélie rise once more, handing her off to her waiting guards. They won't meet her eyes as they lead Amélie back toward the door.

She's the wrong kind of doctor for this, but that doesn't mean it doesn't kill her to see a woman once so full of life so—empty.

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be more romantic and less sad but like consider: sad gen *fingerguns*


End file.
